Hardware Z97 Close Up: Gigabyte and Asus ROG boards

Aria have listed a load of Gigabyte Z97 and H97 boards on their site. May be useful to gauge pricing?

 

More a question than anything, but what does have Intel have to gain by not allowing press and manufacturers to publish full blown reviews. Once they are in the supply chain i don't see what they have to gain by holding out on us.

 

Over the years i have purchased quite a few ASUS ROG motherboards, but with he omission of sata express, my next series of new builds will be from another brand

 

your quote is correct and the truth is as yet i dont know the benefits other than 10gb speed advantage , but if new standard exists why not go with it and why purchase something that maybe redundant within the year

 

@Dogbert666 - Unlike M.2, SATA Express is sort of backwards compatable.

2 standard SATA cables can be attached to one SATA Express port, meaning that until SATA Express lands, we can still use current issue SATA drives.

See:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express

 

I have not seen one manufacturer implement a good SATAe/SATA configuration yet, i envisioned boards with no normal SATA ports, just 3-4 SATAe ports.

EDIT: And AFAIK both M.2 and SATAe are initially only offering one PCIe lane, so i think we will only be able to use either one M.2 or one SATAe drive

 

Does anyone use pci slots anymore?

 

Yea from what i gather if you want the faster speeds you are going to have to buy a new drive, either a M.2 or a SATAe drive, from what i can tell reading about pre-NDA leaks they both use the same controller (if that is the right word)

Obviously nothing can be confirmed until after the NDA, but from what i understand both connector types use the same controller that uses two PCIe gen 2 lanes for a total maximum of 1Gb/s

What has me bummed is that (supposedly) the 1GB/s bandwidth is shared between both M.2 and SATAe so no matter what drives are used, or if RAID 0 is used we can't exceed this 1Gb/s I only hope that future boards either use more PCIe gen 2 lanes, or use PCIe gen 3 for higher bandwidth.

 

I think satae will be a dead end. There are no advantages at all over m2 and it has a major con of needlessly bulky connection. Obviously only ssd will take advantage of such speed so there is really no need to stick to hdd form factors when it can be a small pcb directly attached to the motherboard.

I wish motherboard manufacturer would stop putting vga dsubs on motherboards. Who uses vga anymore?

 

But what are we going to do if we want more than one M.2 drive ?

 

Just like with msata... you accept that there is only one slot for that on a motherboard. For my primary gaming system I only have a single ssd for some time now so for me there is no downsides. Large ssd is still not cost effective for mass storage, especially not multiple large ssd. So for most they are still likely to use some large traditional hdd there and would be irrelevant anyway.

 

I don't agree with the 'if new standard exists why not go with it?' approach at all and part of the reason was mentioned later in the same sentence, 'why purchase something that maybe redundant within the year?'. Levels of adoption of technology standards vary and always have, there have been numerous cases where a standard is set only for the industry to adopt a competing standard and not always for the better technology advantage, most often cost plays a heavy part... (VHS v BetaMax... HD-DVD v BluRay... etc).
Thunderbolt has been a standard for long enough and yet there are very few implementations of it in use today and it is very, very expensive for what it does. It is a very risky business for manufacturers yto back new tech. Costs are high and that increases the overall cost of the product which always ends up being passed on to the end customer. Look at the two most recent Mini-ITX gaming boards from ASUS and MSI, ASUS has an excellent pedigree on many fronts but MSI came at it from a different angle by ticking most of the same boxes but while keeping cost significantly lower and by all reports the MSI board ended up being far more popular regardless of the drawbacks, layout, for example.
In short, I am very happy that some of these choices are taken away from me and that new tech and standards are brought in bit by bit as I certainly don't want to pay £200-£300 for a board that has all the bells and whistles that will never get used for one reason or another, only to look back a year later and realise that I could have spent £100 for a board that did exactly what I needed it to.

 

Is it me, or the X99 platform is more exciting? These are just are Z87 refresh.

 

Yes the majority of people only use one SSD for the system drive, so having one M.2 connector on the board is probably no biggie. The problem i have is with the way manufacturers have implemented SATAe, i have already said it but having both types of SATA connections on a board (standard and SATA Express) seems like they missed the point of SATAe.

Yea the Z97 does seem a bit lack luster, almost like a test bed for how well M.2 and SATAe will be received. When is X99 due ?